Sehwag - The difference between 'Freedom' and 'Technique'

While Indian batters walk into the Kotla fog under a new captain this morning, the series well sealed under their belts; it is the electricity, the energy that once used to vibrate in the stands, that is no more. The dew wet chairs are empty, the sparse crowd is quiet - no shouting, no chirping, no clapping.

One hour into the play and not once the ball has crossed the fences. Things look unusually quiet. That is what your difference make, dear Sehwag. While the world of cricket identifies you as a quick scorer, a swashbuckling batsman, someone who takes the bowling apart from the word go; I had known you as that obvious difference between ‘noise’ and ‘quietness’, between ‘screaming' and ‘clapping', between just a ‘test match’ and a ‘celebration’.

And as I push myself to believe against your absence, I realize that you have had already put on the jersey for the last time, leaned into your stance with music on your lips and have struck the last glorious boundary ever.

It is emotional to watch you in a suit in the stands today, talking about the golden memories of your immortal career, as a part of me continues to believe, may be long with desperation, that you would just come out again in the sun, swinging your arms and insert the amazing ‘difference' that you are into the silent corners of Feroz Shah Kotla and recreate magic once again.

As you walk off into the glorious sundown of your career, I get a strong feeling that may be it is just not retirement. It is the end of India's hope to go to lunch with over 250 runs on board. It is the end of the Mexican Waves that your shots raised in the crowd. For now it is once again the welcoming of a ‘game’, that you with your Midas touch did transform into a breezy ride of love and laughter over the last one and half decade. Or may be your bidding adieu to this sport that holds the heart of billions of Indians together, is a gentleman’s silent slap to two and a half years of being kept waiting and neglected by the BCCI. 

At the end, you won it all. And they lost it forever. 

The crawling score board, the fearlessness in the mind of the opponents and the empty stand shall continue to loom like an impenetrable shadow for many…many years to come.

Sobhan Pramanik

Old Address

I still write to your old address. After all these years. Guess the letter box has long filled now. Those blue inlands must be spilling from the slit. Even the postman must have given up on delivering to the box that had not been opened in ages. Few of those letters, I suppose, became one with the winds. Few, the kids down that lane must have crumpled into paper balls and smashed them at each other. The story that was supposed to be between you and me, is now a public affair. This wind, the sky, the blades of rain – they all seem to know about those kisses, that once were a secret in our breath. But I don’t regret that. Not even a bit.

This feeling of being exposed is good. This feeling of somehow being alive in your love is good. This feeling of being never answered to is good as well. They are all good, if not the best.

Surely, my heart would not have been able to stand the fact of my letter being opened by another man at your new address, your new home, and being asked about the sender with a shrug and your dismissing my love altogether with a laughter, labelling me as your ‘past'.

That would have been the worst, you know, against all these painful goods that I gracefully embrace. For I was, I am and I will continue being your today, till the curtains finally come down on this life.

© Sobhan Pramanik